Rita Casadio

Rita Casadio has a degree in physics, and after working in laboratories of biophysics in USA and Germany she was enrolled by the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1987 as an Assistant Professor of biophysics, and in 2001 as a Full Professor of biochemistry/bioinformatics at the Faculty of Physical Mathematical and Natural Sciences. She is the founder and the group leader of the Biocomputing Group, a research team working since a decade in developing tools for problem solving in computational biology. One major field of research is the application of machine learning methods to the prediction of different structural and functional features of proteins, including membrane proteins. Several applications are available as web servers for sequence analysis and structure prediction, proteome annotations, and structural bioinformatics (www.biocomp.unibo.it). The results of these works have been selected several times for presentation at the International Forum of Bioinformatics “Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology” (ISMB). A method for the prediction of protein contact maps was scored as the best of its category in CASP nos. 4 and 5 (Asimolar, California, 2000 and 2002 ). A method for predicting the topography of outer membrane proteins based on HMM and sequence profile was acknowledged with the SGI best award at ISMB02 (Edmonton, Canada, 2002). RC with the Biocomputing Unit is active in organizing international schools on bioinformatics. She cochaired WABI 2005, and serves at the Editorial Board of BMC Bioinformatics and BioData Mining. Presently, she is the President of the Bologna International Master in Bioinformatics. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of INBB, an Italian Interuniversity Consortium, acting as a representative of the Italian Minister of MIUR; the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB); the Italian Society of Bioinformatics; and of the National CNR-Life Science Department (under the Bioinformatics project).